Usually when I don’t write for awhile I don’t read for awhile. And vice versa. The two seem to go hand in hand. When I read regularly I tend to be writing more. When I write regularly I tend to be reading more. Anyway…I’ve recently started back the two activities after a few weeks of…don’t really want to call it a “hiatus.” I think I’ll call it, sitting on my ass doing nothing. Yeah, that sounds right.

Anyway…for book 27 I read: “A Bite to Remember” by Lynsay Sands.

Vincent Argeneau is a centuries old vampire who owns several theatre companies. Lately he’s experienced several instances of sabotage that has forced him to close down his plays. His cousin, Bastien sends him a private investigator to help. The problem is…the PI is a mortal…and a girl. And he can’t decide which part of that equation he’s more put out about.

In Lynsay Sands’ world, vampires came from the advanced civilization of Atlantis and they are actually humans who used advanced nanobyte technology. It’s an interesting version of the vampire mythology. They wander the earth searching for their life mate, the one person destined to be their partner for eternity. They’re only allowed to have one child every hundred years (for population control) and only allowed to turn one person…period. The person they turn is normally the person who is their life mate.

While Sands gives us a detailed explanation of how nanobytes works and how turning works in her world, (she even goes so far to explain the evolution of canines to help replace the blood from all the nanobytes working so furiously to keep them all young and beautiful and illness free), she doesn’t tell us anything about why they have one true life mate wandering around (one they often have to wait centuries for.) While it’s paranormal romance, and that’s fine, I do wish she’d explain the backstory on how life mates came to be.

Maybe it’s just a fluke and it’s an issue of…very rarely a vampire will find someone they’re really drawn to whose mind they can’t control, and they take that person as a mate. I’m not sure I buy the “destined to be their life mate” business though, if only because the rest of Sands’ world is set up with an internal logic that doesn’t rely on “magic” to make it run. Introducing a magical element in the form of “fate” seems out of place.